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In a world obsessed with function and meaning, a world characterised by ego and self- realisation, Evelyne Hendrikx art is a welcome reminder that we already are. Looking at her imagines is a confrontation with the order that exists beyond construction. These images do not address origins, reasons, points of views. They honour aliveness.

It’s not important whose aliveness; no war is fought, no mission appointed. Hendrikx uses photography beyond the dominant paradigm of representation. A technique that isn’t technical, that isn’t interested in display. The camera is an ordering tool that presents us with the world without the ambition to frame it. Like a shovel, like a crane, it extracts the raw materials Hendrikx needs to shape her art objects. There is a de-fetishisation of technology; it is not important where the camera points, or, more radically yet, how it functions. Photography is a dull labourer, made to deliver.

Deliver to what? Hendrikx’s perception. Of architecture, of water, of the sky. Over time, her fascination with aliveness moved from concrete places to the more vulnerable motif of temporality: How does the moon move across the night sky? How does a wave break on the sand? Hendrikx’s images are always composed of an entire series of photographs capturing the harmonic patterns of a distant microcosm. What they share is a concern for the impersonal, the common, the removed. By no means does this remove the viewer from the world; the opposite is the case. Hendrikx domesticates life “out there” by subjecting it to intense, careful scrutiny.

The images teach us that zooming out can be a discipline of intimacy and mindfulness. It is an action yearning for inclusion; by opening up, it celebrates wonder, not portrayal, complexity, not simplicity, plurality, not singularity. It presents us with a world in which nothing is special, but all is vulnerable. It is a world in which the action never lies.